Introduction to Yoga Philosophy (Pt. 5)

So, I tend to meditate a lot. I most enjoy metitation when I'm home alone, and am therefore free to sit anywhere I want, even if I don't have a yoga mat around to use. There are many different ways to meditate, perhaps even infinite ways with each phsysical meditative position being different from the last, but however you choose to meditate, whether you know it or not, you're meditating through an ancient and rather difficult process known, in Sanskrit, as pratyahara. Unfortunately, due to the sheer complexity of its nature, there's not a whole lot I can say about the concept of pratyahara, other than that when translated from Sanskrit it means something like, "removing indriyas from material objects". Indriyas, of course, is the general name given to describe the tenacles of conciousness Patanjali was talking about in the Yoga Sutras. Pratyahara is the stage at which a human being figures out how to control these so-called tenacles of conciousness through the form of meditation. The concept of pratyahara allows men and women to achieve the ability to sense, in the subtlest of ways, the purity of multidimentional space.

In the Bhagavad Gita, which is my absolute favorite Vedic text and most likely the most well-known ancient manuscript having to do with the basic concepts of Hinduism, the battlefield reincarnation of Lord Krishna spoke quite extensively of indriyas, naming each one as the five physical sense we're most familiar with, such as sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, as well as a sixth non-physical sense he described as being the innate sense of the mind. Having control, more or less, over the indriyas you were born with is like...Well, let me try to explain it in a slightly different way, saying only that giving your full concentration on a tangeable item is not completely unlike reaching out an invisible sensory tentacle towards that object, which relays bits and pieces of external information back to other indriyas, working one way or another. That way of teaching it still might sound quite twisted and strange. I really wish I could find a better way to explain exactly what the definition pratyahara is! The concept of pratyahara is simply something that's far too complex for me to articulate; and because I'm a very inarticulate human being by nature, and also because pratyahara is such an extremely important thing in the world of meditation, I cannot find the appropriate words to fill in the army of gaps I've created by even attempting to tackle the ambiguous subject of pratyahara.

I admit defeat, kids. I hate to say it, but...This essay, which is the fifth in my series of teachings of rudimentary yoga philosophy, is several paragraphs shorter than I had originally intended it to be. I'll stop, now.

Coming Soon: An essay concerning the concept of dharana. That one will be quite a lot better than this, I promise!